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Dissident Voice reports
After a week of limited coverage of "unimaginable levels" of radiation inside the remains of collapsed Unit 2 at Fukushima[...], Nuclear-News.net reported February 11 that radiation levels are actually significantly higher than "unimaginable".
Continuous, intense radiation at 530 sieverts an hour (4 sieverts is a lethal level), was widely reported in early February 2017--as if this were a new phenomenon. It's not. Three reactors at Fukushima melted down during the earthquake-tsunami disaster on March 3, 2011, and the meltdowns never stopped. Radiation levels have been out of control ever since. As Fairewinds Energy Education noted in an email February 10:
Although this robotic measurement just occurred, this high radiation reading was anticipated and has existed inside the damaged Unit 2 atomic reactor since the disaster began nearly 6 years ago.... As Fairewinds has said for 6 years, there are no easy solutions because groundwater is in direct contact with the nuclear corium (melted fuel) at Fukushima Daiichi.
What's new (and not very new, at that) is the official acknowledgment of the highest radiation levels yet measured there, by a factor of seven (the previously measured high was 73 sieverts an hour in 2012). The highest radiation level measured at Chernobyl was 300 sieverts an hour.
[...] This coverage relates only to Unit 2's melted reactor core. There is no reliable news of the condition of the melted reactor cores in two other units.
[...] Whatever is actually going on at Fukushima is not good, and has horrifying possibilities. It is little comfort to have the perpetrator of the catastrophe, TEPCO, in charge of fixing it, especially when the Japanese government is more an enabler of cover-up and denial than any kind of seeker of truth or protector of its people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:56AM
Let's start with those quotes:
> All four buildings were structurally damaged by the original earthquake
No
> and by the subsequent hydrogen explosions
Yes, for those which did have explosions, which is not all four.
> so should there be an earthquake greater than seven on the Richter scale, it is very possible that one or more of these structures could collapse
Could, but they are designed not to, and the corium is in the strongest area.
Also, there have been MANY significant Earthquakes in the area since the disaster (a few 7+, tons of 6+), Magnitude is cute, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
> water flows from the mountain range beneath the nuclear plant
Correct, hence the "ice wall" which is supposed to stop the flow into the plant. It's not for structural reasons, it's to avoid having to store and decontaminate all that water.
> liquefying the ground, a sure-fire setup for cascading buildings when the next big one hits
That's not what liquefaction is. And if you look at the area, those giant buildings do not rest on liquefaction-prone sediments but on the bedrock that forms those mountains. It's a design parameter, not some freak post-quake occurrence.
> [isotopes] none of which are healthy for marine or human life
> (...) Resultant cancer cells incubate anytime from two years to old age, leading to death. That’s what cancer does; it kills.
No shit, got an actual point or just going for scary?
That's why people don't live or fish there anymore, or downcurrent from it.
Other:
> They don't even know exactly *how* bad things are.
> They don't know exactly where any of the 3 cores are, so any "planning" they do is simply guesswork.
Only correct if "exactly" is taken literally.
The cores melted their vessels, and the corium is partly inside the vessel and partly at the bottom on the primary containment. They did muon tomography on one of them and saw that the core was mostly still in the vessel. The robot, before dying, confirmed that the corium melted a 1m^2 hole under the vessel. It matches what any specialist would have told you was likely to happen (they could tell you on day one, but the journalists did listen to Tepco instead)
They knew all along that the radiation was enough to kill a human in seconds. The measured level, obviously higher than ever because it's closer, doesn't matter as much as the absence of continued nuclear reaction or major leaks. Which happens to be what the building is designed for.
> Now they want to hold an Olympics in the region
37.8 million people live in the Tokyo area. I'm glad you care about a few thousand tourists coming for a couple weeks.
They're a lot safer in Tokyo than in Rio.
(Score: 1) by qzm on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:15AM
All their carefully cut and pasted 'hot items!' from their All Radiation is Bad Mkay! forum have been ruined!
That is just inconsiderate, dont you know you are supposed to huddle in the corner watching 60s nuclear attack!
videos and avoiding all rice because it may have been grown inside the containment building, and then exported
all the way to America, just to get you?
Damn you and your critical thinking!
I am all triggered, and will have to go and eat my calming food, the wonderful natural banana, while I recover
from your attack on Mother Earth!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:14PM
The robot, before dying
This is the strangest part of the story.
Yes I probably can't build something that works in a core. Some rando Japanese engineer probably can't either.
But nothing radiologically interesting happened in the meltdown AFAIK. Its a big Fing mess but there's nothing radiologically interesting, its just another boring reactor core, admittedly one mushed all over, but just a boring as hell reactor core. No interesting physics, no interesting chemistry, not much interesting engineering. And for half a century professionals have been Fing around with refueling and decommissioning non-melted down reactors. And reprocessing plants which make our a-bombs or make new fuel in France where radiation levels like this are BAU just another boring day at the office.
Personally I think the Japanese / TEPCO are stonewalling and trying to extract more money. Send us billions or we won't fix this. Sorta like when rioters demand "do what we say or we'll burn our neighborhood down and you'll be really sorry".
I mean... its just boring nuclear fuel. If they're not intentionally stalling, why are they so utterly ineffective? This should have been cleaned up years ago.
All I can say is someone is CLEARLY milking a cost-plus contract for all its worth. And for anti-nuclear bias reasons the press can't cover this angle because it would make all the problems look like the usual corruption and not voodoo scary radiation anti-nuclear fearmongering.
Its sort of like some oil well stuff that I do know about. Could I shut down a well thats kicking? No. Could rando SN reader or j random engineer? No. Could a specialist contractor who's been doing stuff like this for 40 years, yeah, boring, BAU. If the Japanese need experts in fuel reprocessing or environmental remediation, why don't they just hire them? Corrupt corrupt corrupt to the core(-ium).
(Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:45PM
Is this an elaborate sarcastic troll? Or can you really not comprehend the difference between intact fuel elements and a melted down hell? In the former case (normal reactor work and refueling), the radioactive hell is still contained in intact cladding. In the latter case (after a meltdown) it's all exposed and compounded into corium [wikipedia.org], consisting of a mixture of nuclear fuel, cladding, fission products, control rods, structural materials from the affected parts of the reactor, products of their chemical reaction with air, water and steam, and molten concrete from the floor of the reactor room. Noxious aerosols and gases are released.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:06PM
the radioactive hell is still contained in intact cladding.
Nope sure isn't. You're confusing zirconium cladding with something like a cask or lead shielding.
I mean, think about it inductively if the cladding contained all radiation then it would be quite challenging to reach prompt criticality... Even worse if each rod were a critical mass and geometry (geometry very important...) then it would be out of control before installation.
The purpose of cladding is mostly corrosion control. Its not a radiation filter at all. Well, yeah yeah whatever alphas and some/most betas shall not pass whatever.
Yeah I agree its a pile, but its a pile of stuff they know. Like a tornado hits a tannery, its going to be a mess with stinky stuff everywhere mixed up, but the tornado didn't create anything inherently new in the process of mixing stuff up.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:50PM
Well, what's new is that the nice cranes which allow safe remote movement of the rods can't hold corium, and the radiation levels are so high that robots would rather volunteer for a trip though the belts of one of the gas giants, because even rad-hard stuff has a bit flip limit.
It's also hot, probably locally extremely so, with chain reactions on tiny scales, and if they try to move material, it can get hotter just because it moved.
So yeah, it's a pile of known stuff, not the scary out-of-control monster that OP gewg was quoting.
But it's really a number of kill-you-dead-instantly piles surrounded by partly melted high-strength metals (originally sized to be, or hold, a 3000MW multi-ton pressure cooker in place), and meters of nuke-proof concrete. It probably is technically simpler to inject the whole thing with molten lava and leave it there for a few centuries of technical progress (three giant black obelisks), than to cut away the protective layers and safely scoop the corium for some kind of reprocessing.